As he started working the phones, too busy to consider what it meant for him, he remembered what she said about the lie that is the idea of home.

37

Donny had made it into the canopy of flowers when he stopped and turned.

“Joyce,” he said.

“Yes, Donny.”

“I’m sorry.”

She stopped playing her notes, but took a while to answer.

“I’m sure you are, Donny.”

He walked back to the porch. It was just the two of them now.

“I mean, I’m sorry about Wade.”

“We all are,” said Joyce. She always was good at cauterizing her psychic wounds and hiding them from others.

Donny remembered the footage the government had leaked of Wade’s execution. The way the President’s goons had made him sing. Not Wade’s protest songs, but the songs of the so-called patriots.

Freedom isn’t free.

Joyce set her guitar against the wall. That was when Donny noticed the gun she had holstered to the front of the belt that held up her jeans.

“And I’m sorry I let you down,” said Donny.

“It’s okay, Donny. At least I wasn’t the only one. Ask Sig.”

Donny looked at his boots. They were beginning to look broken-in.

Donny had worn out his shoe leather when they kidnapped Joyce and brought her back to a cold cage in Dallas, on charges of treason and conspiracy. He called in every favor he had. He learned what had happened. How, while Donny and Joyce were in Mexico City, Wade had come to New York to play a show, on a special visa that turned out to be bait. How they arrested him during his performance, the better to strike fear into the hearts of his fans and followers, to show the price of dissent. How quickly he had broken during interrogation. Telling them everything he knew. Including where they could find Joyce.

Donny’s efforts to free Joyce were not successful. Not at first.

Donny’s efforts to build a network with himself as the conduit, between the people that were inside and the people that were outside, were more successful. Joyce was not a node in that network. He only heard stories, more like fragments of stories, about what she was doing. Making her new gospel, which like any good gospel, mostly just told the truth, spiced with the kind of mythic bullshit people like to hear. In Joyce’s case, by beatifying dead American dissidents and a few live ones, and turning one story of separatist utopia into a model for others to follow.